Sometimes it wasn’t an easy matter to find out what a trick wanted because he was either too ashamed to ask or else did not know how to express some curious urge. The women would have to help him then.
Most of the women rejected men who wanted to sodomize them. Spanish Nan claimed to prefer it.
“I think your milk been poisoned, honey,” Dovie-Jean told her.
“What I don’t like,” Spanish Nan complained, “is the trick who wants to suck my toes. I put up with it all the same.” Then added thoughtfully, “Afternoon is the time for weirdos.”
“What do you want me to do with this?” Big Benjamin asked, holding the oxford the stud had left.
“I’ll take it,” Fortune offered. “I’ll have it bronzed. It’ll bring good luck.”
5
Athens
“The lid is about to blow,” a fellow-officer phoned warning to Captain Carlos Connery at Connery’s home that morning. Connery left his watch and wallet behind when he went to work.
“Back off from any attempt to provoke you,” he instructed his officers at roll-call. “If a man calls you a pig, you take it. We don’t have the force to handle a confrontation.”
Connery assigned Officer Gavin DeJohn to handle D Company. DeJohn, a young relief officer without experience in handling a company, opened the lockbox of the cell-locking system but left lever twenty-two up. He’d been ordered to keep that cell’s occupant deadlocked.
“Why is Calhoun being keeplocked?” one black prisoner demanded to know of DeJohn.
“I only follow orders,” DeJohn replied.
“Hell then,” the man decided, “lock me up too,” and walked off down the corridor to his own cell. Several Muslims followed him back to theirs.
As the rest of DeJohn’s company passed the lockbox, one prisoner reached in and pulled down twenty-two without being observed by DeJohn. A few moments later Calhoun came up and joined the group quietly and sat down to breakfast with them.
“There’s a man supposed to be in keeplock having breakfast down here,” Officer Urquhardt phoned Connery in the administration building. “What do we do?”
“Finish breakfast,” Connery instructed him, “then get them into their cells. Don’t let them into the Square. I’ll be right over. I know what it’s about.”
Connery had no idea of what it was about. A rumor had spread, cell to cell, that one of the keeplocked men had been taken out during the night and beaten so badly that he was now in the hospital in critical condition. Coming out of the mess hall, the men spotted an officer holding a gas gun. This confirmed the rumor to them. That the rumor happened to be false made no difference whatsoever.
Connery considered the incident to be only one more schoolroom prank of Calhoun’s. He possessed perfect confidence in his own ability to get the men back into their cells without upsetting the whole cellblock. As he was walking a voice behind him said, “You no-good mother,” and he felt himself struck on the side of his head.
Urquhardt turned just in time to see Connery fall. He rushed up and caught a hard smash to his jaw, knocking him cold on the cold stone floor.
When Urquhardt came to, he was lying on the ground in a corner of the Square. He sat up and saw DeJohn sitting up on one side of him and Connery, bleeding from his head, on the other.
“I’m glad I left my wallet home,” Connery told Urquhardt.
The administration had always depended upon the Big Gate to guarantee its security. This was the gate, leading to the administration building, which was locked by a three-point bolt system. It was only necessary, in order to contain rioting men, to lock it. It was so stoutly made that it was not conceivable that it would give way.
It gave way all the same. “When those fifty men hit that gate,” one guard reported, “it didn’t slow them down for a minute. The gate bounded in against its hinges.” One of its big bolts had been welded and the weld painted over so often that it was no longer detectable. When Calhoun’s company began hitting it, the gate swung back upon itself.
Eight correction officers were surrounded in the Square the minute the Big Gate gave way. Nobody, least of all the rebels, grasped what now began happening. A riot had begun upon momentum accumulating for months, and swept everyone before it.
Every security measure the P.B.A. had taken now turned against them. Their impregnable gate left the officers outside while lending protection to the rebels within. The officers’ keys, hidden in the arsenal in the administration building, left officers trapped in offices, toilets, broom closets and storage rooms.
The super began getting calls from all over the prison as the rebellion spread. The super phoned the state police and the commissioner. The steam whistle in the power house began sounding a general alarm. But since this whistle was also used to announce individual escapes, the townspeople did not assume that this time it meant not escape but riot.
A shout greeted the officers being marched across the Square:
“Kill the pigs!”
A protective ring of Black Muslims surrounded the officers almost magically. The shout died down and was not repeated.
Gary Stein, a convict clerk, twenty-two years old, was sweeping the corridor with used coffee grounds, to keep down dust, past a cell in which officers Dowdy, Harridan, Halstead and Durso had barricaded themselves. They had nightsticks but no guns.
“Maybe they’ll just forget you’re here,” Stein told them hopefully. “Just stay quiet.”
Stein had served two years for check forging, had been released and was now back for some violation of parole. He had six weeks yet to serve.
“Get ready,” he warned the officers, “here they come,” and stood to one side, holding his can of coffee grounds and his broom.
“If you come out you won’t be hurt,” one of the prisoners advised the officers.
“If I were you I’d take their word,” Gary Stein put in. He was a well-meaning boy who had never learned to keep his mouth shut.
Halstead handed Stein his wallet. The four men were then blind-folded and led off to the Square. Halstead got his wallet back three days later but not from Gary Stein.
“Do you want to leave with us or do you want us to hide you?” the men working under Officer John Sheeley, in the tailor shop, asked him. Sheeley chose to be hidden. They locked him into a storeroom on the shop’s second floor before the rebels reached the first floor.
“There’s an officer locked upstairs,” one of the workers informed the rioters.
“He’ll have to figure how to get out by himself,” was the answer. Then they set fire to the building.
The Muslims had now set up a large tent in the center of the Square to house and protect their hostages. Hostages had been given prison clothes and their uniforms hung neatly in one corner.
“It made us feel hopeful,” one survivor later recalled, “to see our own clothes ready to be put on again. It made us feel they were ready to deal fairly with us, and they were.”
There were now eleven hostages. The Square was getting crowded.
Block Nine is off the Joint’s nerve center and houses prisoners also off-center. Some cannot cope physically; some cannot cope mentally. Others have been on Cloud Nine for years. They are old broken plates long overdue for the ashcan.
A dozen of them were in their dayroom getting a touch of September sun. Some were playing cards with beat-up decks. Others sat dreaming of times long gone that seemed, always, to have been golden times.
What the rioters thought a psych ward might yield them they never asked. They broke down the door into a long white corridor, housing nothing but these old time-servers: some on crutches and some in wheelchairs. When Bixby, the officer in charge, was stripped to his underwear, some of them began whooping in mindless joy. Others began groaning in despair. Bixby was forced to lead this straggling mob of wildly happy, deeply despairing, whooping, groaning old men, on crutches and in chairs, into the Square.
“The dingdongs!” They were greeted by cries of welc
ome as if they were a winning baseball club returning to its hometown after a winning road trip. “Welcome, dingdongs!”
The rebels began pushing ice cream lily cups into the old cripples’ hands, then lit cigarettes for them and stuffed their pockets with chewing gum and candy. The old broken cons sat lapping pink, vanilla and chocolate ice cream. Somebody stuffed a pill into one of the ice cream cups, and, in no time at all, the dingdongs were all lapping up pills of every color. Some of them went on the nod and others tried to get out of their wheelchairs. One of them kept shouting, “Bananas! Bananas!” but nobody knew why. A holiday spirit began pervading the Square.
Every color, shape and size of pill could now be had for the asking—or the grabbing—under the basketball backboard, most of them unidentifiable. Stimulated by a pill he could never name, one dingdong shook his crutch challengingly at a gun-tower guard, clenched his emaciated fist and shouted, “Come on down here and get us, pigs!”
A young prisoner, tall, dark and bespectacled, mounted a bench in the center of the Square with a bullhorn to admonish everyone in the Square:
“Men! This is not a holiday! Not a picnic! No time for pills! We are challenging the administration! There are no blacks, no whites or Puerto Ricans anymore! This is not a race riot! Do you want to be treated like men? Then act like men!”
This was Elvie Barker, serving eight years for a hundred-dollar stickup. After years of battling each other on the streets and in prisons, Barker was now asking Black Muslims, Black Panthers, Young Lords and whites to put aside their differences.
The whites may have been willing but they were wary. Seven of them hung together in a tent on the handball court. They kept to themselves and were left alone for the first hours of the riot.
Then one of them heisted a white flag on the tent. Five black security guards walked over and ordered all seven prisoners over to the big new tent, housing the hostages, that the Black Muslims had just constructed. Elvie Barker charged all seven with treason, and they were shoved into a corner of the tent, opposite the corner where the hostages were held, to await trial on Barker’s charge.
Half a dozen groups, five or six men in each, no one group all black or all white, began bringing in more officers and stripping them to their underwear. They also brought in half a dozen more prisoners, three blacks and three whites, and put them in the corner with the seven whites already taken. One of the new “traitors” was Gary Stein.
Teeney Sweeney, a big white man in for life for first-degree manslaughter, who had managed the prison infirmary for two decades, set up an infirmary in the Square: a medical aid station equipped with drugs and bandages. Through the four days of the riot, assisted by four prisoners, he treated both hostages and prisoners. Although Sweeney had never performed a suture in his life before, he made them successfully now.
Rumors, rising out of the old contempt of the officers for the prisoners, claimed that hostages were being abused sexually. Townspeople accepted these rumors. All were false.
Two hundred state troopers had arrived under Major Marcus Hanrahan. Two hundred were not enough, Hanrahan decided, to retake the prison. He would wait, he announced, for three hundred more before attempting an assault.
Long-haired demonstrators heightened tension by materializing across the street from the prison, bearing signs sympathetic to the rebels:
FREEDOM TO OPPRESSED PEOPLES!
WE SHALL OVERCOME!
When a bus from Spanish Harlem wheeled up, local people felt they were being invaded from abroad.
One of those who came off the bus was a tall black man wearing flowing white African robes. He hitchhiked to the prison and identified himself there as Kenyatta Islam. In the tumult of events Pat Wilson had no chance to check his credentials; he accepted the man at face value.
The youthful civil rights lawyer, who had already gained a national reputation defending radicals, Max Epstein, and a black mayor, a black judge and a white journalist, as well as Kenyatta Islam, were the first members of Pat Wilson’s negotiating group.
“You’re undermining yourself, Mr. Wilson,” the super assured the commissioner. “The only way a prison can sustain itself is through exercising absolute authority. Once you start negotiating over hostages, whether you get them back unharmed or not, you’ve lost. Lost heavily. Because you have given the green light to every prison in the country to take hostages.”
Wilson had been trying for prison reform for years. He disregarded the super’s counsel. He now perceived an opportunity not only to implement old hopes, but to avoid bloodshed as well.
“There’s a first time for everything,” he advised the super.
This was the first time TV cameras and press photographers had been permitted inside a prison to witness negotiations. An audio system enabled every man in the Square to hear what was transpiring in the hostage tent.
“Had it not been for the cameras around us,” Calhoun observed later, “negotiations would have taken a different turn. Our people weren’t used to all that publicity; they began role playing. We lost sight of what was real and what was not real. Amnesty and flight to a third world was a soft-headed dream that looked beautiful on color TV. It had nothing to do with reality. Getting more than a slave wage in the metal shop would have been more real. Getting in touch with lawyers without censorship would have been real. Getting machinery into the metal shop, or typewriters into the typing school, would have been more real. Conjugal visits were real. Seeing visitors without a screen or glass between was real. Demanding to be treated like men, instead of dogs, that was the realest of all. Amnesty was no real way at all.”
“We have come to the conclusion that if we cannot live as people,” one rebel assured them from the table set up in the center of the Square, “we will then die like men.”
From being faceless numbers, whose voices were unheard and whose agony was unheeded, these men had leaped overnight into the nation’s spotlight. Helpless all their lives, they now held their society helpless. They felt a confidence they had never felt before: one out of all proportion to their true capability.
The cameras created an illusion, in their view, that the outside world was passionately sympathetic to them. They felt a rising tide of international love for them, of pity for their pitiable lives, and encouragement of all their hopes.
Which simply did not exist.
“We’ve got Connery here,” the rebels’ bullhorn let the super know, “Do you want him?”
“We want them all.”
“Remains to be seen. Do you want Connery or don’t you want Connery?”
“Why Connery?”
“He keeps passing out. We can’t do anything for him.”
“We want them all.”
“Do you want Connery or don’t you want Connery?”
Two black security guards assisted the officer to the administration gate. He collapsed there into the arms of correction officers.
When Carlos Connery collapsed, the bitterness of his fellow officers, particularly over the Supreme Court decision limiting their control over men in their charge, deepened. It was their friends who were now being held, their colleagues. Therefore it was their right to free them.
They were only country boys feeling they’d been wronged, and were entitled to right that wrong themselves. Some had brought old hunting rifles to do the job.
Which was the very reason, of course, that the governor was holding them back. What he wanted was not reprisals, but order out of chaos.
The rebels now controlled the Square, the metal shop, the auditorium, school and commissaries. The establishment held the hospital, the powerhouse and the kitchens.
Small groups of uncaptured officers began attempting to regain parts of the prison without orders. They drove a forklift truck up to the tailor shop, pried open the bars of a second-floor window, and got John Sheeley out ahead of the flames.
Down a corridor they encountered a stout young Puerto Rican chewing a candy bar and toting a bucket full
of candy bars still to be chewed. He’d finished one bucket, he admitted, and was on his way back to his cell to finish this second bucket. He gave up the uneaten candy reluctantly and was led to the administration building.
Len Reedy, a civilian supervisor of some thirty men in the coal gang, was standing beside the powerhouse, talking to an officer on the wall, when another officer opened a gate to let a garbage truck through. Three prisoners leaped off the truck and assaulted Reedy. Reedy, a big man, did not go down. The officer in the gun tower gave warning: “Stop or I shoot!” The prisoners fled. The powerhouse remained in the administration’s hands.
“We’re not dealing here from strength,” Calhoun advised other leaders under the hostage tent, with Wilson’s group facing them. “What strength we have can last only until the administration decides to use force …”
“Brothers!” Calhoun was interrupted by Kenyatta Islam, standing a full head over most of the men present and a head and a half over Calhoun. “No amnesty! No transportation! We are going to stay and die here! The world revolution is at hand! It is beginning here!”
Calhoun looked at Wilson. Wilson looked at Epstein. Epstein looked at Calhoun.
“The masses are on their way!” Kenyatta went on. “They shall overcome! Overcome state police! Overcome the national guards!”
“What about the air force?” somebody inquired quietly.
“I am an authorized representative of the Intergalactic Mission,” Kenyatta finally disclosed his credentials. “I have a message for the Planet Earth. We are beginning to enter the period of Aquarius. Many corrections have to be made by Earth people. All your weapons of evil must be destroyed. You have only a short time to learn to live together in peace. You must live in peace”—here he paused to gain everybody’s attention—“you must live in peace or leave the galaxy!”
It appeared high time for the representative to leave the galaxy himself. A couple of security guards muscled him out, still raving, to the administration building. Correction officers there found him to be unarmed.
The Devil's Stocking Page 21
